


Blue hydrangeas

by iriswesttt



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-12 04:52:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7921270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iriswesttt/pseuds/iriswesttt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: “We broke up, but I never changed my emergency contact info and you dropped everything when they called”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Miss West?”

Iris jumped awake to the sound of someone calling for her. For a second, her eyes focused on Barry until traveling enough to find the source of the voice; a nurse. A different one than the one Iris had spoken to when she arrived at the hospital.

“Sorry,” Iris told the woman, she was expecting to get kicked out of Barry’s room all night, but she wasn’t leaving until she necessarily had to, so she asked; “do I have to go?”

“No, no,” the nurse said with a sympathetic smile on her lips; “you can spend the night. I just, need to move your chair a little bit.”

Iris stepped out of the way as the nurse attended to whatever it was that she was doing. Iris liked this nurse better. The one who she had spoken to when she arrived refused to answer any of Iris’s questions, telling Iris that it didn’t matter she was Barry’s emergency contact, they weren’t family so she couldn’t give Iris any information and she would have to wait for the doctor the next morning.

But this nurse seemed nicer, so she tried with this one;

“When is he gonna wake up?”

“Tomorrow morning,” she said chancing a glance at Iris, and she must have seen all of her desperation showing there, for she added; “don’t worry, he’s fine. He’ll be just fine.”

Iris shivered as the memory of picking up her cellphone and being informed it was from Saint Peter’s Hospital coursed through her.

And then of course she couldn’t book a damn flight, had to wait for hours and hours at the airport, agonising, as Barry went through surgery for “internal bleeding” and laid on a hospital bed all by himself.

“But you’ve seen him awake?” Iris asked, willing all that fear away.

“Not really,” the nurse told her, and Iris found that to be a strange answer, but she explained without needing to be probed;

“He was hallucinating when he got in. It’s normal,” she added in a hurry; “don’t worry.”

“What was he saying?”

“Something about his parents,” she told Iris, and of course he did.

Barry’s parents had died in a car accident when he was 11 years old. It took Iris four months to get Barry to talk about it for the first time. They were together there was more than a year already the first time she persuaded him to take her to his parents grave.

And now she felt guilty. She had been the one to talk him into taking his driving test, she was the one who taught him how to drive in the first place and now he was lying in a hospital bed after a car accident and it had taken Iris almost a whole day to arrive.

“And he kept calling for you,” the nurse added. “He’s fine, miss West. I promise.”

“Yeah, ok,” Iris agreed, even though she wasn’t sure how much she believed it.

Seeing him like that made things harder. For starters, Iris wasn’t planning on seeing Barry again. Not now anyway, not until she was over him, so probably not ever.

Seeing him all broken like that made her miss him even more. Miss him awake, the sound of his voice and his nervous tics and the way his knees would jitter.

His lips on hers.

All the while they had spent apart Iris had kissed one other boy, only to find out that kissing someone else felt wrong, felt like cheating, even though it wasn’t, felt like his lips moved wrong, like he tasted wrong, like he breathed wrong. So she hadn’t kissed anyone else afterwards. She was giving herself some time, time to forget how Barry felt. Now she would need extra time.

Barry and her had fought for months and months before graduation. They were talking about getting married, but Iris wanted to move back to Central City, go to journalism school there, work at CCPN one day, hopefully. She didn’t want for her family to be built away from her parents and Wally, and it was _delicate,_ it was easy for it to sound like _I have family and you don’t so we’ll go there before we start ours._ And then Barry got a job he didn’t like at a lab he didn’t like and he refused to leave Metropolis, so Iris stayed for a while, she stayed until it was time to apply to journalism school, hoping one day in the middle she would be able to convince him.

Convince him that he didn’t have to stay in a job that didn’t make him happy just because the pay was good and was what he “had chosen to do with his life”, that he could talk to his grandma about moving, that she wouldn’t hate him for bringing it up, that he could live in Central City again and not be tormented by the town his parents had lived, and died, that was the problem, in. But she never did manage to convince him, so Iris got into the program she wanted for grad school and she moved back and Barry stayed.

That was why Iris didn’t want a serious boyfriend in college anyway, because graduation was always bound to come. But life had other plans, life had put Barry Allen literally in her way on the first day of college. Before the first day actually; Barry lived two floors down from hers in their freshman year and after almost knocking her to the ground when moving his armchair into his dorm-room, he helped her move all of her shit and she helped him move all of his shit.

They kissed the first time 3 hours later. They fucked the first time 28 hours later. They moved in together 12 months later. And they broke up 57 months later and now there she was, realising fully just how much she missed him for the first time. How much she missed his heart beating under her fingers at night. How much she missed their home, the smell of it, and the dirty sofa which Barry had worked so hard on convincing her that was the one for their living room. She hated the sofa and the fact that it was off white so it showed every mark. But if she were to look at the sofa she was sure she would cry.

She often wondered how he managed to keep living amongst their stuff. To have their stuff to turn into his stuff. She often though she probably wouldn’t manage. To look all around her and see him all the time. She already saw him in little things throughout her day enough as it was, without having to come home and sit on the damn sofa at the end of the day.

And then there was all this weight sitting on her chest because of the boy in front of her. Because of all the space he used to take and left empty all the sudden, all because he was too stubborn, and she was too stubborn and he refused to see her reasons.

“That’s it for tonight, I’ll see you in the morning,” the nurse said, and Iris attempted a smile as she thanked her, but it was probably more a wince than anything.

She dragged her chair back closer to Barry’s bed again and grabbed his hand. She missed how they fit together. Her hands on his. She missed how his fingers fit between hers. She missed how he fit on her, all of him and all of her.

She missed his green eyes and his glasses, she missed his smell too, the hospital was messing it up, she couldn’t feel it, not even so close to him, he smelled sickly of sweat and maybe that was blood, and hospital disinfectant, so Iris ran her fingers through his soft hair — and that felt familiar enough under her fingertips — hoping he would hurry and wake up soon.

And she was dreading having to go back to their apartment — his apartment — when he did wake up; he had broken ribs and a fractured arm, he would need some help, at least for a while, and she hadn’t a good enough reason for not to offer it, so it wasn’t like she would be able to avoid it, the place, their place, completely.

(She wondered if he had changed the keys. If hers would still work. The one she still kept on her key chain.)

Dreading having to face Mrs. Allen and having to tell her that her grandson was at the hospital, after a car crash, like her son and daughter-in-law once.

Dreading having to go back to her own life after that, having to once again grow accustomed to the fact that she no longer shared it with Barry.

* * *

 

Barry watched as Iris unlocked their apartment door. Or rather his apartment door since she no longer lived there. Having Iris back in Metropolis felt almost worth it, worth the pain when he breathed in because of the broken ribs, and the surgery, and then the 48 hours in a hospital bed. Worth anything, however temporary her actually being there was going to turn out to be.

She dropped her bag on the side table by the door and took her black boots off, like she used to, like she could still walk around in the dark and remember her steps and not bump into furniture.

Furniture she had chosen with him. Granted they were mostly from Ikea and some really cheap stuff on craigslist but it took seven months so they could settle on what couch they should get. They had chosen everything together. And Barry could feel her perfume in the house, and the smell of her lemon cake in the air and it was all painfully familiar. She was painfully familiar.

She had gotten him blue hydrangeas and they sat on the dining table inside her favourite vase, the same one Barry avoided using since she left.

Blue hydrangeas were her favourites. Barry got her irises for months and months until she confessed she thought that was a little too cheesy and that she didn’t really like irises. Then he started buying her white peonies and blue hydrangeas instead. Then she left and he stopped buying flowers all together. There seemed to be no point in it. They would die anyway.

“I cleaned up a bit, this place was a mess,” she said, like she hadn’t just walked into their home, like it was still their home, like she had forgotten she didn’t live there anymore; “and I bought some fruits and stuff yesterday at the farmer’s market,” then she turned to face him and said; “I saw Sara, I can’t believe how big she is.”

Barry nodded because he knew exactly how big Sara was. He still saw Sara, and John and Lyla every Sunday he managed to get his ass down to the farmer’s market, he still bought his fruits from them every week.

He also nodded because he knew Iris and she was talking to avoid the overwhelming which was in turn overwhelming him, so he closed the front door behind him, and with the hand that hadn’t been broken he pulled her to him, because he hadn’t touched her until now, because if he didn’t hug her, he would drown.

She felt exactly like he remembered and she smelled exactly like he remembered, her soap and her shampoo and her perfume and her clothing detergent — the one he had also stopped buying — she smelled like Iris, his girlfriend, his best friend, but then she was pulling away, telling him _he_ stunk of hospital and that he needed a shower and that she would make him soup and then pick his grandma up so she could come for a visit.

With every second, Barry regretted exponentially more having told her no.

She was right, he didn’t like his job, and she was right, he was afraid to admit it, admit he had failed in picking what to do with his life. It wasn’t about the money though, his parents had left him enough money for a few years of figuring it out, it was his pride. She was also right that he was afraid to move back to Central City and be haunted by the city where his parents had died, and she was right that he used his grandma as an excuse, that he never asked her because he knew she would say yes, _yes Bartholomew, I’ll leave my nurses and move to Central City, I’ll go with you and your pretty girl_. She still called Iris “your pretty girl” even months after the break up, after Barry had tried and spectacularly failed to move on, and if he had asked her she would have said yes, and then all that would be left as excuses would be on him.

That was the trouble with Iris; she knew him all too well and she was always right.

After his shower and the soup, after his grandma’s visit and after Barry had done the dishes and Iris had driven his grandma back home and taken a shower herself and changed into his clothes because she had forgotten to pack pyjamas, after she sat on the couch by his side like they used to do in the end of the day, every day, for four years straight, and told him he had scared the crap out of her, after she changed the channels until deciding on some movie Barry had watched her watching at least a dozen times, Iris leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder and told him;

“Now you smell right.”

And there was nothing Barry could think to say as an answer to that. If that was months ago and they were together, he would have kissed her, he would have nuzzled into her and he would have felt her skin under her shirt and felt the weight of her boobs on his hands.

Now all he seemed capable of thinking, on a loop in his brain, was _I miss you, I miss you, I miss you,_ but it didn’t feel right to tell her that.

And as he thought about how no one would ever feel that right against him, he thought that maybe it was time, there was nothing more scary than the fact that he was losing her, had lost her, after all. And the ring had been in his sock drawer fitted for her finger for three years now, so he should just tell her yes and hope for the best, hope she would tell him yes too.


	2. Chapter 2

Iris folded the blanket, the blue and white one, the hand-made one they bought on a trip to Coast City once. She had considered putting it in her suitcase when she packed, before moving it out; she liked the pattern and the colours, but she also liked how it would always reminded her of that day, of Barry’s hand in hers as they walked on the shore and the sun warming her up, so she left it behind, like most things. Like a whole life, sometimes it seemed.

She did take the necklace Barry had given her on their first Christmas together. She could never bring herself to wear it though. Sometimes, especially when she was nervous, her hands would jump to feel it sitting on her neck and found nothing instead, or found something else, and she would think of him all the same. No necklace, no Barry. It was like she couldn’t win, it hurt to have it there and it hurt to not.

She wished she had the necklace now though.

He handed her a cup of coffee, his eyes on her as she tried it, waiting for her, for her answer it seemed, and as pushed her blanket and pillow further on the couch so she could sit on it.

She missed Barry’s coffee. Even with just one good hand, he managed to get it right in a way she never quite did. She made good coffee, but Barry, as he always said, made Iris’s coffee.

Iris promised she would stay a couple of days; he would have to wear the cast for 2 weeks and the ribs would take 6 weeks to heal. Iris promised him 6 days. 6 days so he could get use to it a little bit, so the pain when he breathed in would mostly go away, so she wouldn’t miss too much class and too many shifts at the Jitters. So she could hopefully leave again.

“I’ve missed your coffee,” Iris told him, and she saw a shadow of his cocky smile, but before it could fully be, there was a pang of sadness in his eyes.

“How are the ribs feeling?” she asked, looking down at her mug so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

“Fine,” Barry said, but he winced as he sat besides her, so Iris smiled at his lie.

“I miss you, Iris,” he said.

And he had kept her drawers empty. Iris had checked. She came home - _she went to the apartment_ \- to pick up some clothes so he could wear out of the hospital and she opened her drawers. It was a little like digging on a open wound, a weirdly satisfying pain, to see how he had filled her spaces around their home, but they were empty, and that somehow hurt more.

He never fully closed his lips after he said that, _I miss you, Iris,_ and that dug on her wounds too.   

She always liked his lips parted like that, the little bit of white teeth showing against the pink of his lips and Iris almost leaned in to place a kiss on them, her heart beating in her chest like it was trying to escape, and she wanted to feel his warm breathing and the taste of him on them, mixed with coffee, and how his lips would undoubtedly move to match hers, like some well rehearsed choreography, but somehow still thrilling and surprising.

But she didn’t.

She stood up instead, but then her lips wouldn’t completely obey her, so they said;

“Well, I’m here, so you can’t possibly miss me right now,” she looked at the French poster above the sofa as she spoke it, it didn’t seem like she would managed it if she were to look at him.

“Iris.”

He held her in place, taking her hand in his and she missed him too, she missed him all the time, so much that it could make her sick if she stopped to feel it, and it was the little things that made it worse, like the way he held her hand, how sometimes he would use both hands to hold one of hers, like her hand was so precious, like it needed to be held with care.

He was always careful, with his words, with his touch, even when he was bruising her, he was careful.

He rose in front of her, anchoring some of his weight on her, wincing at the pain that standing up was causing him, and then brushed her hair behind her ear, and the pad of his fingers traced her jawline, and then her lips. _How do you have such perfect lips?_ , he had asked her more times than she could count. His hand slid down her arms.

And she couldn’t kiss him, she didn’t have it in her to go through all of that again, but if he kissed her, she didn’t think she had it in her to not kiss him back either.

It took a great effort so she could make herself tell him;

“This is a bad idea, Barry.”

She was telling herself too, _this is a bad idea, Iris._

“Iris,” he said again and she wished he hadn’t. And she missed her name on his lips; no one else could ever speak it quite like that.

She took another step back, her hand holding her chest because it felt like she would disintegrate at any second so she was trying to keep herself together.

“I don’t want to have this argument again, Barry.”

“I’m not arguing, we’re not arguing,” he told her shaking his head

“No, but we will,” she said, because she knew exactly what would happen, they would be reminded of just how much they needed each other only so she would have to get used to leaving without it again.

“We kiss and then you ask me to stay and I can’t, because if I stay now, then we’ll never leave,” she said.

Barry pulled her to him, one of his arms embracing her while the other stood between them in a cast as a reminder of why exactly Iris was there, and his breath tickled her neck as he inhaled and exhaled deeply and then murmured to her;  

“What if I ask you something else?”

Iris slipped from his touch, studying his face, trying to figure out what he meant by it, but she couldn’t let herself believe it before he actually said it, so she asked;

“Something else?”

“Will you take me?” he asked, his eyes watching her, his fingers pulling on the hem of her t-shirt, well, his t-shirt actually, towards him, and this sudden warmth hit into her, as the tears puddled in her eyes, and she asked him;

“Don’t say that, don’t say that if you don’t mean it.”

He took another step towards her and Iris would hit the wall at any moment if he kept doing that. She gazed into his eyes, his pretty green eyes, framed by his golden glasses and there was honesty in them as he said;

“I mean it.”

“What about your grandma?”

“I’ll talk to her.”

“And your job?”

“I’ll quit it,” he promised, and Iris wanted to ask _why now? Why make us go through all of that? Why all the suffering then if you were just going to give in in the end?,_ but she didn’t, she had no interest in fighting this fight again, she had no interest in living without him either, so she forgave, she would take him, as long as he was willing to be taken, she would take him.

“And you’ll come with me?” she asked, because she had to be sure, she had to make it absolutely clear before she could let herself feel all the giddiness bubbling through her.

“If you’ll still have me,” he said, like that was ever a question. It was never a question, not all those years, not now, not ever.

She suddenly remembered the 18 year-old Barry, standing in front her, his eyes big because she had just kissed him for the first time, as a smile slowly formed on his lips and his eyebrows furrowed in confusion and he asked her _yeah?_ like he couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that she wanted him. Back then she had just kissed him again.

“I would like that,” she said now.

After he got his confirmation, he pulled her to him, forcefully, causing himself to let out a moan of pain as she hit his ribs with her ribs. Or maybe it wasn’t just pain, there was a sob coming out of her own throat and it had nothing to do with pain, it was relief, and probably a bit of expectation, as his lips met hers and her hands settled on the back of his neck, which seemed like an injury-free, safe enough place to settle, and she missed him, she missed him, she missed this, she missed them.  

* * *

 

“I’ve missed you,” he had told her a couple dozen times during the week she stayed. But he couldn’t help but tell her again as he watched her lying on their bed, naked.

He had three broken ribs so he couldn’t exactly do much more than watch.

He certainly didn’t mind watching her though. Iris was entertaining to watch, even when she wasn’t trying. Now he suspected she was trying, a little bit. At least the way her chest would rise and fall seemed too hypnotic to not be a little bit for show.  

“You said that already,” she said, hands reaching for his hair and damned his stupid broken arm and his stupid broken ribs standing in the way of him and her.

“And your sticky thighs,” he told her, his hand traveling up from her knees, to meet where she was warm and slick; he needed a deep breath so he could take her trembling beneath his fingers.

Iris laughed though. She had always found this amusing.

 _I don’t think I’ve ever came like that_ , she once told him between laughter. It was their first week together, it was their third time, his third time, her third time (she had told him halfway through the first time, as they seemed to fight against time to get out of their clothes, _I should probably tell you, I’ve never done this before_ ), and Barry was trying to be quiet; the dorm walls were thin, he didn’t want for his dorm-mates to hear them, though Iris never seemed to care. She was never loud, she never put on a show with her moans, she just never held back.

And he still wasn’t sure how he got her then, though now, as he thought back, it never felt like he got her, it felt like she had miraculously chosen him and Barry had merely thankfully accepted it.

He laughed with her then, as her fingertips travelled on his damped hair, and his belly, _not even alone?_ he asked because he liked the praise, and he liked the way she talked about it and he liked the way she rubbed her legs on his and the way she shook her head with a sweet smile on her lips and a _we should try that again_. The legs were sticky back then, they were sticky now, the best kind of sticky too.

“You got them sticky,” she told him now, and he smiled proudly as he carefully lay by her side.

Barry interlaced their fingers, watching their hands as they danced around, her thin fingers and her painted nails. She liked her nail polishes and Barry had learned which ones he should buy her, as a little present from the trip to the supermarket or the drug store; he could tell by the glass, the really rounded fat one, the cone-shaped one, and he had learned the colours too, mostly reds and pinks and berry-toned ones. He liked that he could predict that, could predict most of her.

He was avoiding it though, avoiding the question. He liked their silence and didn’t want to disturb it, so he studied her body as she turned on her belly, her boobs squishing against the mattress, and Barry traced her spine, resting his hand flat on her bun.

“Let’s get married,” he finally said as her eyes softly fluttered.

They had talked about it before, before the break, before those months, they talked about it for years, it wasn’t getting engaged, but there was certainty to it, _when we get married we’ll get a house with a backyard then you can plant how many hydrangea bushes you want. When we have kids we’ll build a tree house, and a swing._   

 _Ok,_ she told him then, _ok,_ she told him now, her eyes resting closed and Barry considered that maybe she wasn’t taking it like he meant it, hadn’t taken it like _now_ , like let’s plan it, let’s set the date and wear rings on our fingers. So he asked again;

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I would like that,” she said and Barry would get the ring in a minute and she would hopefully like that too, and it would hopefully fit, but first he would smell her skin for a bit longer.

She had the ring on her finger when they said goodbye at the airport two days later; it did fit, like she fitted him.

He didn’t want to let her go, didn’t think he could face the two weeks without her, not as he breathed into her neck and felt her there, warm and real, and the tears formed in his eyes, blurring his glasses, streaming down his face, wetting his kiss.

She cradled his face with her hands, softly and forcefully all at the same time, and she promised him, her nose bumping into his;

“I’ll be back to help pack. Two weeks. Two weeks.”

And then she kissed his lips and he didn’t want to let her go, he didn’t want to let go of her.

“I love you,” she whispered between his lips and he could taste her words. They tasted the same throughout all those years. They tasted like her.

“I love you, too,” he said, and the words were so easy now, they wouldn’t come out the first time though, he thought about them for two months, 9 weeks actually, before he could bring himself to say them.

 _You told me already,_ Iris had said, _in your sleep,_ and then he cursed his loose lips and she laughed _you can’t keep a secret_ , she said, and then she told him she loved him too, but she wanted to let him say it first and remember it, since she already knew, because it felt dishonest saying them with a guarantee he would say them back and then he knew she would never seize to impress him.

“Don’t go,” he begged her now, and this words sounded childish, sounded like he was saying he couldn’t live without her, and he was asking himself how he had managed those months, because now it seemed so true, it seemed like he couldn’t.

“Two weeks,” she promised with another kiss, “two weeks.”


End file.
